Post by beatlies on Sept 6, 2008 18:15:30 GMT -5

A JOHN McCAIN---Paul (Faul) McCartney link: one of Senator John McCIAn's suppressed scandals is the married affair that he had with celebrity actor/singer CONNIE STEVENS. A journalist named RON BIANCI set out to expose the affair in the press. It seems that Sen. John McCain and co. had Bianchi murdered.

Here is an early appearance of Faul with Fingo at the Melody Maker awards, September 1966. I'd guess that the guy playing Faul here might be Dino Danelli, also of the Young Rascals american group, and that Ringo may be impostered here by Felix Caliveri, his band-mate in the YR. The other award recpienet in this charade is american Connie Stevens:

Post by beatlies on Sept 11, 2008 5:43:32 GMT -5

The first photo of Faul in this collection in the below youtube: his feet are different from before, the previous Faul had pigeon toes, distinctive, odd and different from JPM the real Paul's "normal" toe arrangement. The bare feet of this one are "normal" again. It fits with the theory, that I maintain, that a new Faul was switched for the older Faul known in these forums as "Bill" in or around 2005. The face is different, and skull, and there are voice and personality differences. TKIN also seems to think this. The "new" Faul aslo seems on much better terms with, and more comfortable around Yoko Ono than "Bill" had been. Look at the bare feet of Faul in the first picture:

Post by beatlies on Sept 23, 2008 15:35:11 GMT -5

One and one and one is three (and more!!)

In order chronologically,

1) The Dino Danelli Faul

2) The Bill/Pearl Witherington Faul

3) The post-2005 Faul

4) Some others, temporary Fauls and stand-ins possibly played by candidates such as Denny Laine, other JPM-resembling Wings members, even a young pre-fame Sylvester Stallone, Andy Kaufman and the lead singer of Left Banke Steve Martin Caro have been mentioned.

Post by on Sept 23, 2008 16:06:17 GMT -5

So was Dino Danelli the one that went to that award presentation in mid-Sept 1966? Was Bill (Campbell from Ontario?) the one who went to Africa in late '66? I haven't heard of Pearl Witherington yet. What's the story on him? Thanks :-)

But wait... it seems to me that the Sgt Pepper Faul doesn't look like the Wings Faul...

I first suggested that one of the Bob Dylan imposters may have been a woman, with voice overdubbed (in 1969, for example in the Johnny Cash-Fob Fylan TV show videos). Then a year later a movie come's out with Cate Blanchett playing one of the multiple "Bob Dylan" characters.

Dylan had an unusually small and thin physique; maybe easier to find a woman who could fill this requirement.

About Cate Blanchett, this interesting sync from wikipedia article about former SOE heroine Pearl Witherington (allegedly the McCartney imposter, I noticed that she also looks like ERIC IDLE!)---

Private lifeIn September 1944, Witherington returned to England where she married Henri Cornioley in Kensington Register Office on 26 October 1944; they had a daughter, Claire.

With the help of journalist Hervé Larroque, Witherington's autobiography, Pauline, was published in 1997 (ISBN 978-2-9513746-0-7). Much of her wartime service is also included in the book Behind Enemy Lines with the SAS (published in 2007 by Pen and Sword Publ., England).

Her story is said to have been the inspiration for the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray which was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett in 2001,[2] although Faulks denied this in an interview with The Guardian.[8]

...........

I guess "the musical Monty Python" Eric Idle (Rutle Paul character Dirk McQuickly (styled after Paul McCartney) -- played by Eric Idle) is Pearl Witherington's son, so he is the son of Beatle Faul, now isn't that funny ("I want to be called Loretta") ..........

Here come ole flattop

Also reminds me of Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, a film with many Crowley-Beatles-links.

MMT comics panel: "Thinks I AM the Driverr/ Thought I WAS the Courier"

From the "Spartacus School" web site on PEARL WITHERINGTON:

Her commander recalls: 'She used to say, "I don't think it's very nice to go into a restaurant on my own." She'd come into France on her own, but didn't think it was nice to go into a restaurant on her own!'

Pearl came from Hertfordshire but was working in Paris. She and her family escaped in 1941 with help from the resistance, and she started work as a secretary in the Air Ministry.

Bored with office work, she signed up as a FANY. After training she was sent to the southern Loire. When the organiser was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, Pearl took over the command of the Wrestler network and built it up to over 2,000 men who she trained and armed. Her group held off 2,500 German troops with 150 men. Pearl escaped through a cornfield.

In June 1944, her network cut the railway line to Paris 800 times. She became so important, the Germans put up posters offering 1 million francs for her capture.

'When we got back to London all the heads of circuits were there; they were all men, and I was the only woman. The head of it all said "Gentlemen!" And he turned to me and said: "That applies to you, because you've done a man's job!" I'm the only woman who's ever done such a thing: going from a courier to military commander!'

Others were not so keen to recognise her achievement. She was recommended for the Military Cross but, as a woman, was not allowed to receive it. She was awarded a civilian MBE that she returned because she had done nothing as a civilian. 'Why should secret agents who risked their lives be treated like someone who sat behind a desk during the war?'

Post by beatlies on Oct 9, 2008 9:28:55 GMT -5

In a massive new book, Paul, George, and Ringo look back at Beatlemania. We look back at the death rumor that caused a press frenzy.

By Jesse Oxfeld

Late on the night of Tuesday, November 8, 1966, Paul McCartney left a Beatles recording session at the Abbey Road Studios in a huff. He'd been fighting with John Lennon, so he got into his Aston Martin and drove off. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a lovely woman named Rita, perhaps a hitchhiker and perhaps also a meter maid, and they were still driving at about five in the morning. By that time, it was Wednesday, November 9, and at that early-morning hour there was a crash. It may have been caused because Paul didn't notice a light had changed. In the accident, Paul was decapitated, probably, or at least suffered from a major head injury that caused his death. There were likely no witnesses, and, if there were, they didn't realize that the headless body or bodiless head they were looking at was that of the famous Beatle. Concerned that the news of a band member's death would lead to the end of the Beatles' great success, John, George, and Ringo -- together with the various businessmen and companies who stood to profit greatly from the Beatles' continued popularity -- decided to mount a cover-up. Paul's death was not announced, and a look-alike named either William Campbell or Billy Shears was hired to play his part. No one caught on. But the other Beatles felt bad about hiding this news from their fans, so they began planting clues about the truth. Lyrics had secondary meanings. Album covers contained coded images. Songs told the bits and pieces of the story. Secret reverse-recorded messages were added to tracks. But no formal announcement was ever made. Fake Paul went on living the life of Dead Paul. He tried not to sing out of key, and he got by with a little help from his friends, John, George, and Ringo. He left Paul's longtime fiancée, Jane Asher, and married a woman of his own choosing, Linda Eastman.

None of this is true. We think. But for a few brief weeks in October 1969, the world wondered whether the whole thing really had happened, whether Paul was dead and had been replaced by an impostor. The story was reported in newspapers around the world. Radio DJs investigated. There was a TV special. It was several weeks before the Beatles could quell the rumor and convince people that Paul was, in fact, still very much alive. But, even so, all these years later the rumor has never totally died down.

This month, the three surviving Beatles, together with Yoko Ono, will come out with their first autobiography-ish work, a massive volume called The Beatles Anthology. The book, which will go on sale worldwide October 5 (almost 31 years to the day after the Paul Is Dead rumors broke on American radio), touches only briefly on this odd story. "It was just madness," Ringo says in the book. "There was no way we could prove he was alive. We said, 'Well, how can we prove this rumor isn't true? Let's take a photo!' But, of course, they would say, 'That's just his stand-in in the photo.'"

From the moment they first touched down at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1964, through their Ed Sullivan Show appearances that month and through the rest of their careers, the Beatles were the focus of intense publicity and media interest. Indeed, the media attention started from the moment the band stepped off that Pan Am airplane to be greeted by those famous mob scenes. That first American press conference, held in a conference room at JFK -- you've seen it a hundred times in TV clips and VH1 specials -- was a masterpiece of media handling. Four handsome, self-assured young men, answering a flurry of questions with aplomb:

"Will you sing something for us?"

"We need money first."

"How do you account for your success?"

"We have a press agent."

"Do you hope to get haircuts?"

"We had one yesterday."

For the next five years, the boys enjoyed good relations with the press, notwithstanding the occasional "We're bigger than Jesus" brouhaha. But near the end of 1969, the Beatles and their managers were hit with a story they weren't expecting and couldn't control. It started in Detroit, on Sunday, October 12, 1969, when a WKNR-FM disc jockey named Russ Gibb devoted his show to the question of Paul's death.

The story had begun to move through the Midwest in underground papers and college dailies sometime earlier. But with Gibb's broadcast, it broke into the mainstream. Two days later, in The Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan, a student named Fred LaBour wrote a straight-facedly sarcastic review of Abbey Road, presented as an obituary, in which he lined up all the death clues. Many credit LaBour's piece as the Rosetta stone of the Paul Is Dead story; others say the original source was a thesis at Ohio Wesleyan University. Regardless, after Gibb brought it to the public's attention on WKNR, the story was out, and it soon spread far and wide.

At the time, the biggest radio station in the country arguably was New York's WABC-AM. It had the best disc jockeys, it played the best music, and, most important, it was hugely powerful: At night its signal regularly reached as many as 40 states. Very early on the morning of October 21, 1969 -- early enough that most would call it late the previous night -- overnight DJ Roby Yonge told his listeners that he'd been looking into "the fact that there is something very strange about the Beatle Paul," and that "the Beatle Paul may be dead." Yonge spent 15 or 20 minutes discussing the Paul Is Dead clues, and then the program director pulled him off the air. Yonge never broadcast on WABC again, but it was too late. "Once WABC hit it," fellow DJ Bruce Morrow recalled recently, gravel-voiced as always, in a telephone interview, "well, then it became a national event and it got national attention." Cousin Brucie, as the legendary disc jockey is known, had the early-evening slot on WABC in those days (today he appears twice a week on WCBS-FM, the oldies station in New York). "When you do something in New York radio that reaches the imagination of an audience, it's like an atomic bomb going off," says Brucie. "But we never experienced anything like this Paul Is Dead thing."

The evidence to bear out the story is, if you're of a mind to see it, quite persuasive. In 1996, more than a quarter-century after the original hysteria subsided, R. Gary Patterson published The Walrus Was Paul, an encyclopedic collection, spread over 197 pages, of all of the clues to Paul's death supposedly buried in Beatles albums: voices inserted between songs, messages decipherable only by playing records backward, cover artwork with ominous meanings, and many, many more.

Papers from coast to coast covered the controversy of Paul's possible death, as did papers in London. Most of the stories had tongue planted largely in cheek, it's true, but nevertheless there was a flood of coverage, from an article on the front page of The Washington Post's Style section about "the clues which have fed a recent outbreak of death rumors concerning one of the creative masterminds of the Beatles" to a piece in the alternative Los Angeles Free Press observing that "The Beatles' Paul McCartney was dead for a while last week." WMCA-AM, another New York radio station, sent a DJ to London to investigate. The Detroit News ran an investigation in its October 16 issue, recapping many of the Paul Is Dead clues. The New York Times ran a dispatch from London on October 22: "Beatles Spokesman Calls Rumor of McCartney's Death 'Rubbish.'" The San Francisco Chronicle ran a report noting that "a Paul McCartney death cult is forming" and followed the next day with a dispatch suggesting that Paul was probably still alive. F. Lee Bailey did a TV special examining the evidence alleging that Paul was dead. Time magazine for October 31 carried an essay making fun of the story. But there was one problem with the denials: There may have been statements from Beatles spokesmen, but nobody had heard from Paul. With the death claim out there, and without any public appearance from the allegedly dead man, more and more media outlets began to wonder whether there was any truth to the rumor.

"The mistake," recalls Peter Brown, "was not producing Paul." Brown looks every bit the older English gentleman: trim, white-haired, and dignified, leaning back in an overstuffed chair in his spacious, antiques-filled living room overlooking Central Park West. In 1969, he was a director of Apple Corps Ltd., the parent company for the Beatles' various enterprises. After the 1967 death of the group's legendary manager, Brian Epstein, Apple Corps took on all aspects of the Beatles' business lives, and it was run by Brown and Neil Aspinall. Aspinall worked on the creative side of the company, while Brown ran the day-to-day business operations and helped deal with the press. "It was our naïveté, in a way," Brown says, "but you can't blame us for being naïve because nothing like this had ever happened before."

Today Brown is not nearly so naïve, and he knows what he's talking about. Since 1983, he has been a partner in several international public relations firms. Currently, the firm is Brown Lloyd James, and one of the services offered in its brochure is crisis management: "Speed of reaction, knowledge, insight into the media's agenda and contacts at the highest level mean that we offer outstanding service to clients faced with crisis situations involving intense public scrutiny." In October 1969, the crisis was not well managed. "The fact of our silence, that we couldn't produce Paul, really only made the story bigger," Brown says. "Because even the mainstream media were starting to get curious as to why -- why wouldn't we produce Paul?"

In fact there were two reasons Brown and his colleagues wouldn't produce Paul. The first was that they didn't realize they really needed to. The Beatles had a good relationship with the press, what Brown calls a "very 'matey' relationship." It was a simpler media time, when reporters believed what public figures told them and, in some cases, would play along with some subterfuge. It didn't occur to anyone involved with the Beatles that when a spokesman told reporters that Paul was still alive, the reporters wouldn't simply believe it. "I think we would be much more savvy these days, and less trusting," Brown says. "The new thing is 'instant response.' You really do have to deal with these things as quickly as possible."

But even when officials at Apple realized that, as Brown says, "the media we knew so well for once didn't take our word," they still couldn't put Paul on camera. In fact, they couldn't produce him at all -- but not for the reasons the press suspected.

The end of 1969 was a difficult time for the Beatles. "This was at the key point where the fighting was going on between John and Paul," Brown says. McCartney had purchased a farm in Scotland sometime before, and, says Brown, "he always considered it his refuge. He would go up there and be totally out of contact with everyone."

Paul told people there was no phone at his Scotland farm, though, in fact, there was. And Brown was one of only two people with the number. "The volume of this story got louder and louder, until I felt I had to speak to him and break his rule by actually calling him," Brown says. So Brown called, and Paul yelled. "From his point of view, this was so farcical and such a ridiculous thing that was happening, that he was rather irritated I was bothering him," Brown remembers. "Paul was adamant: I don't want to hear about it; I am here in Scotland; I'm staying here; don't bother me."

So that's what they did. And the pressure on the story continued to rise. Where was Paul? Why wasn't he coming forward? Life magazine -- then hugely popular and influential -- decided to dig deeper. Brown says the magazine's London bureau got a tip about Paul's farm in Scotland and heard that he was in hiding there. So they sent up staffers to find him and take pictures, to prove that Paul Was Not Dead.

Paul and Linda, along with Linda's daughter, Heather, and the couple's newborn, Mary, were enjoying their Scottish solitude, Brown says, when suddenly they noticed the Life crew traipsing through their field. "They see these people coming across and they're outraged," he says. "They're outraged that these people should invade their solitude and their land. And Paul gets angry and starts shouting at them to get off his land and go away and so forth. They start taking pictures of Paul gesticulating and screaming at them. And in the end, he drives them away." Which, of course, is not the best publicity. "Paul quickly realizes that this is very unattractive and the pictures will not be nice pictures," says Brown. "So he runs after them and does a deal: They will give him the film with all those unattractive pictures and the screaming and gesticulating, and that he will allow pictures to be taken." They're lovely, happy pictures, and they made the cover of Life on November 7. "Paul is still with us," read the cover line, and inside there was an article on the few weeks of conspiracy theorizing. Alongside it was a one-column-long dispatch from Paul. "It is all bloody stupid," the nonÐdead man wrote. "Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace?" There's no mention of yelling, or unflattering pictures, or the deal. Paul is alive, and, as always, he's charming.

but what about those pesky clues? Cousin Brucie thinks it was all a gimmick. "I still suspect it was a promotional stunt started by one of the record companies, just strictly for hype," he says. And Paul, in the new book, doesn't entirely disagree: "In the end I said, 'Well, we'd better play it for all it's worth. It's publicity, isn't it?'"

Or, perhaps, could it all be true? After all, the Life story didn't quite put an end to the issue. "German journalists have picked up rumour from States that Paul McCartney is dead," reads a November 13, 1969, telegram to Apple reproduced in the new Anthology. "Would appreciate confirmation that such rumours are false." Maybe the Paul at the Scottish farm, alive and charming, was actually Fake Paul. Someone who could speak to that is the Life reporter who trekked to the farm. The byline belonged to Dorothy Bacon, and that November 7 issue said she "waded through a bog in Scotland to reach Paul McCartney's secluded farm and got this comment from him."

Peter Brown ran into Bacon in London just a year or so ago, but he did not know how to reach her when asked. Time Inc. headquarters in New York had no record of her. At the London bureau, it took four phone calls before finding someone, finally, who knew Bacon's name -- but who didn't know where to find her. She suggested yet another call, to a former Time-Lifer, a friend of Bacon's, retired to the English countryside.

Post by on Oct 9, 2008 13:03:49 GMT -5

"The evidence to bear out the story is, if you're of a mind to see it, quite persuasive."

How true that is. You have to be able to get past the programming & the false belief system to see there are - at least - 2 different Pauls.

And the article isn't entirely correct. Russ Gibb got a call from someone named "Fred" cluing him in that Paul had died and had been replaced (reference for that was the book "Turn Me On, Dead Man" by Andru J. Reeve) I agree that the LaBour story is (mostly) fabricated (I don't believe for a second that Paul died in a simple car accident). Anyway, there was also a "rumor" in 1967 in England that Paul had died in a car crash. Apparently, people noticed that the "Paul" on the Strawberry Fields video was not Paul (not hard to do if you haven't been conditioned to think they are the same).

And I could see the dilemma about producing Paul. Very hard to produce someone who isn't around anymore, isn't it, Fingo?

Post by beatlies on Oct 19, 2008 23:55:12 GMT -5

Who Buried Paul? was first presented at the San Jose Convention Center on St. Patrick's Day 1999, as a featured lecture of the Game Developers Conference. It was repeated by invitation a few weeks later at the corporate campus of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

This lecture was a PowerPoint tour de force of pictures, audio and video. I have attempted to provide a fully illustrated transcription below, with audio content presented as .mp3 clips. Please allow time for all of the images to load into your browser.

The images and sounds on this page are the property of their respective copyright holders, and are included here for educational purposes.

I was twelve years old when the events I am about to describe to you took place.

I'll be rattling off dates and places, and naming names.

In a few minutes, you'll see and hear everything you need to become a minor expert on this strange little episode in the history of mass communication.

But there is something else I want to communicate as well.

Something you can only learn from an eyewitness.

I want you to know what it felt like to be almost a teenager in late October of 1969.

I want you to know how it felt to be talking about this on the school bus, and in the cafeteria of my junior high.

Huddling with friends at night around our record players, poring over our album covers, wondering.

Staying up late with our parents to see what they would say on the 11 o'clock news.

One of our heroes was missing.

Some people were saying he was dead.

The world's most beloved band, ambassadors of truth and love in an age of endless war and assassinations, had been caught in a monstrous lie.

And their records, so full of joy and playfulness, had become the ever-present messengers of a creepy conspiracy.

It was Halloween, and we were really scared.

You may be wondering why anyone would make such a fuss over a bass player in a rock band.

Those of you who did not raise your hands a minute ago probably know the reason already.

For the rest of you, it isn't easy to explain.

You see, this wasn't just any bass player.

And this was no ordinary band.

The Rumor

Nobody knows where or when the rumor began.

The earliest printed record of a Paul-is-dead story appears in the February 1967 issue of Beatles Book Monthly, the magazine of the official Beatles Fan Club.

It contains a one-paragraph article entitled "False Rumour":

"The seventh of January was very icy, with dangerous conditions on the M1 motorway linking London with the midlands, and towards the end of the day, a rumor swept London that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on the M1. But of course, there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles' press officer found out when he telephoned Paul's St. Johns Wood home, and was answered by Paul himself ..."

Speculation that Paul had been killed circulated around London during much of 1967.

McCartney himself alluded to the rumor during a Beatles press conference held in May of that year.

And a subsequent article in the New York Times recounts an incident at a London party in fall of '67, at which the Paul-is-dead rumor was joked about in the presence of the reporter.

At this point the trail of documentation goes completely cold.

Then, two years later, the rumor surfaced again, this time in Des Moines, Iowa.

On Wednesday, September 17, 1969, the student newspaper at Drake University published an article by sophomore Tim Harper entitled "Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?"

Less than a week later, on the 23rd, the student paper at Northern Illinois University plagiarized Harper's article.

Then the rumor spread to Ohio Wesleyan University, where it came to the attention of an art student named John Summer.

John Summer

John became so intrigued, that he compiled a dossier of evidence substantiating Paul's death and offered it to United Press International.

They agreed to carry the story. But no one paid any attention ... at first.

For two more weeks, the rumor gained momentum on the college campuses of middle America.

Then, on the afternoon of October 12, the meme attained critical mass.

At this point I'm going to allow the actual participants to tell you their own story.

But before I do, I need to explain the source of the audio you are about to hear.

During the climax of the Paul-is-dead media frenzy, RKO produced a one-hour television special called Paul McCartney: The Complete Story, Told For the First And Last Time.

TV Guide listing for New York City

This program was videotaped on a set resembling a courtroom, in which various "witnesses" involved with the rumor were formally questioned by an attorney.

F. Lee Bailey

The attorney was none other than celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey, shown here holding a picture of his most infamous client, Albert DeSalvo, also known as the Boston Strangler.

Bailey would later gain even more notoriety as a member of O.J. Simpson's "dream team."

RKO's Paul-is-dead TV special was syndicated on Thanksgiving weekend of 1969.

After the broadcast, all videotapes of the program appear to have vanished without a trace.

Fortunately, the soundtrack was preserved for posterity by an anonymous Beatle fan who taped it off his television set.

Bailey's first witness was this man ...

Russ Gibb, WKNR-FM

... the disc jockey whose call-in talk show introduced the Paul-is-dead rumor to the airwaves.

[MP3] F. Lee Bailey examines Russ Gibb

Q. Would you tell us you name, please, sir?

A. Russ Gibb.

Q. And where do you live, Mr. Gibbs [sic]?

A. Detroit, Michigan.

Q. And what is your occupation?

A. I'm a disk jockey on an underground radio station called WKNR-FM.

Q. Calling your attention to the 12th day of this year, 1969, Mr. Gibbs [sic], in the afternoon, were you on duty and on the air?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. And did you receive a phone call from a listener about Paul McCartney, the Beatles' singer?

A. Yes, sir. I did.

Q. I call your attention now to this reel of tape before me on the recorder, and ask you if you can identify it.

A. It looks like the tape that was taken off our log. We have to log all programming.

Tom: Um, I was gonna rap with your about McCartney being dead. What is this all about?

Fred LaBour

Twenty miles away, a sophomore at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor happened to be listening to Russ Gibb's talk show that afternoon.

[MP3] Bailey meets Fred LaBour

[From the TV special]

Q. May we have your name, sir?

A. My name's Fred LaBour.

Q. And where do you live?

A. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Q. And what is your occupation, please?

A. I'm a student at the University.

Fred LaBour was scheduled to write a record review for the next issue of the University's student newspaper.

Instead, inspired by what he had just heard on the radio, he sat down at his typewriter and spent ninety minutes composing a masterpiece of engineered mythology.

Article from The Michigan Daily, 14 Oct 1969

[MP3] Bailey examines Fred LaBour

[From the TV special]

Q. Are you the same Fred LaBour who published, on October 14th, 1969, an article in the Michigan Daily, a newspaper published by the University, which begins as follows: "Paul McCartney was killed in an automobile accident in November, 1966 after leaving EMI recording studios tired, sad and dejected"?

A. Right. I wrote that story.

Q. Do you know for a fact that that's true?

A. No, I don't.

Q. Then why did you publish it?

A. Well, I was supposed to ... They asked me to review Abbey Road, which was the current Beatle album. So I decided I didn't wanna just, um, write a review about, you know, this is, Paul does this song and George does this song, etc, etc, like all reviews go. So I decided to make it work symbolically, on a religious level.

Fred's article presented for the first time what was to become the definitive legend of Paul McCartney's death.

According to Fred, Paul had been decapitated in a car accident early in November 1966.

The Beatles, conspiring to conceal his death, held a look-alike contest and hired the winner, a Scotsman named William Campbell, to replace him.

The newspaper containing Fred's article appeared on the Ann Arbor campus early Tuesday morning.

By noon, every copy was gone. Two more press runs followed. The entire campus ground to a halt.

As the week progressed, Fred's story spread rapidly eastward, leaping from campus to campus, dormitory by dormitory.

Alex Bennett

And on Saturday night, a student named Lewis Yager at Hofstra University called Alex Bennett's popular talk show on WMCA and informed the City of New York that Paul McCartney was dead.

At first, the mainstream news organizations were reluctant to mention the rumor without more evidence.

A disc jockey on WABC in New York was fired for talking about it on the air.

And the publicity department at Apple Records was flooded with phone calls inquiring about Paul.

And where was Paul while all this was happening?

The missing Beatle

On vacation with his family, on a farm in a remote corner of Scotland.

When the Beatles' chief publicist, Derek Taylor, called him to beg him for a public appearance, or at least a statement to quell the rumor, Paul, who, you will recall, had been through this before two years earlier, instructed Mr. Taylor to ignore the press and leave him alone.

So the media, having no way to verify or dispel the rumor, had no choice but to acquiesce to the public demand for information and began, skeptically, to cover the story.

Within days, the Paul-is-dead rumor became an international sensation.

Articles appeared in every leading newspaper, including The New York Times, the Times of London, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, Variety and the Washington Post. Time magazine devoted a feature essay to the subject.

An instant cottage industry sprang up to support the hysteria.

Special Paul-is-dead magazines appeared on newsstands, and were snapped up by the hundreds of thousands.

[MP3] "The Ballad of Paul" by The Mystery Tour (complete song; 1.8 MB)

At least four different Paul-is-dead novelty songs were rushed into production, with titles like "Brother Paul," "The Ballad of Paul," "We're All Paul-Bearers" ...

... and a number called "So Long, Paul," recorded under the psuedonym Werbley Finster by none other than Jose Feliciano.

Polydor records exploited the scandal by reissuing one of their early Beatle collections with a provocative new cover.

And, not surprisingly, sales of the Beatles own records and licensed merchandise, especially their new Abbey Road album, went through the roof, with frantic dealers selling the back catalog directly out of the shipping cartons.

Now, celebrity death rumors were nothing new in 1969.

Bob Dylan had been the subject of a similar rumor just a few years earlier.

What was it about this rumor that made it so persistent?

Why were Beatle fans so convinced that something awful had happened to Paul?

The answer to that question is what makes this topic interesting to game designers.

The Death Clues

Beatle fans believed that clues signifying the fact of Paul's death had been concealed on the album covers and in the songs released by the surviving Beatles.

This is a defining feature of the Paul-is-dead phenomenon.

Many lists of these so-called "death clues" have been compiled over the years.

Some of these lists contain hundreds of entries.

For the purposes of this lecture, I have concentrated on the classic suite of death clues, the ones most often cited by the press at the time of the scandal.

Clue hunters initially concentrated their attention on four albums:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in June of '67;

Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

the soundtrack for the Beatles' TV special, Magical Mystery Tour, released in December of '67;

The Beatles (aka The White Album) (1968)

the double so-called "White Album," released in November of '68;

Yellow Submarine (1969)

and the soundtrack to the Beatles' animated feature film Yellow Submarine, released in January of '69.

The list of suspects quickly expanded to include Abbey Road ...

Abbey Road (1969)

... released just as the scandal was erupting in late September of '69.

The tools we have for analyzing the images and sounds on these records were unimaginable in 1969.

Nevertheless, in one important respect, those dormitory detectives were better off than we are.

They didn't have to squint at four-inch booklets crammed into skinny plastic cases.

We had albums then.

Although I am no fan of vinyl as an audio carrier, it is hard not to miss the days when records were a rich visual experience.

And no album in the history of popular music exemplifies this experience better than Exhibit A.

Exhibit A: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

This is not the time or place to reflect on the enormous impact this record made when it was released.

Suffice it to say that nobody had ever heard, or seen, anything like it.

Someday, perhaps even in our industry, something like this will happen again.

Every inch of Sgt. Pepper's front cover was crowded with allusive imagery.

Among the faces appearing in the background collage were past and present heroes of the '60s counterculture.

And there in the middle, impeccably costumed in the regalia of a turn-of-the-century brass band, stood the Fab Four.

Now, this scene was probably intended to suggest a nostalgic village square or a quaint English garden.

But in late 1969, Beatle fans looked at this image, with its proliferation of flowers, its freshly turned pile of dirt, the four wax Beatles dressed in black, and Cassius Clay dressed as priest on the side, and saw something different.

They saw a burial.

A burial that seemed to insistently single out a particular member of Sgt. Pepper's Band.

A close look at the image shows one of the background figures, the British comedian Issy Bonn, raising his open palm directly over Paul's head.

This gesture, according to the clue hunters, is an Eastern symbol of the presence of evil.

They also noticed that Paul is the only Beatle holding a black musical instrument, a cor anglais.

The others are holding sparkly gold instruments.

Another curiosity was discovered in this group of hyacinths in the lower half of the image.

They appear to be arranged in the shape of a guitar.

The three or four long sticks, resembling guitar strings, reinforce this impression.

But this guitar is a little bit unusual.

It's left-handed, like the ones played by Paul McCartney, the only left-handed Beatle.

Some investigators went even further.

They claimed that the guitar flowers had been laid out in such a way as to suggest the outlines of a word.

Post by on Oct 20, 2008 10:44:10 GMT -5

Some 40,000 fans are expected to pack Yarkon Park Thursday night to see Paul McCartney perform his classic songs. But will it really be the former Beatle taking the stage, or will it be Billy Shears? Or maybe William Campbell?

Some 40 years after first surfacing, the legend that the former Beatle died in a fiery 1966 car accident and was subsequently replaced by a look-alike, sound-alike imposter still attracts considerable attention and scrutiny. Books, research articles, Web sites, university lectures and presentations have all focused on the plethora of clues that weave together one of the more outlandish but mystifying conspiracy theories that evolved from the 1960s.

"At the time, people took it very seriously," recalled the "dean" of "Paul-is-dead" theorists, retired Delaware high school teacher Joel Glazier.

"It was the end of the '60s. You have to remember this was against the backdrop of the assassinations of Martin Luther King [Jr.] and Bobby Kennedy, as well as the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers. So this sounded like the perfect conspiracy cover-up. People stayed up all night talking about it, and some were actually quite scared."

Speaking words of wisdom: McCartney's full interview with the 'Post'Glazier spoke to The Jerusalem Post from Toronto, where he was a featured speaker at a Beatles convention, along with former John Lennon girlfriend May Pang and ex-Ringo Starr paramour Nancy Andrews.

Glazier initially rose to prominence in the Beatles scholarly world in 1979 by publishing a 30-page comprehensive research article on the issue for the premier Beatles fan magazine, Strawberry Fields Forever, which attracted the attention of Beatles convention organizers.

But in addition to the popular conclusions that the clues were a hoax instigated by The Beatles either as a elaborate joke or to boost album sales, both of which have been denied by all four Beatles in the past, Glazier does offer some additional reasons as to why The Beatles may have initiated an intricate trail of "Paul is dead" clues.

"One of the theories is that the clues were introduced by The Beatles as a kind of tribute to their original bass player Stu Sutcliffe, who left them before they became popular," he said.

Another theory says that Lennon's love of wordplay and studio editing led to some clues in later albums, but that after cult leader Charles Manson attributed his killing spree in part to "hidden messages" in the song "Helter Skelter," the band members chose not to reveal the joke.

And then, going to the extreme, there are conspiracies that tie in everything from a Faustian deal with Satan to a Rosemary's Baby-Mia Farrow-Roman Polansky-Sharon Tate-Manson connection.

However, Glazier prefers to focus on the clues more than the reasons they might have been devised. And even more than the clues, he prefers to focus on The Beatles as a cultural phenomenon and revels in his Beatle fanhood.

Having visited Israel eight times, and being instrumental in the establishment of the John Lennon Peace Forest in the Galilee, Glazier is overjoyed that a Beatle is finally appearing in Israel. "Finally, the people of Israel will get to see the person who is allegedly Paul. And make sure you write 'he said that with a smile,'" said Glazier.

I think this is a wonderful thing for Israel, and for Paul. I've always found a sophisticated musical audience there and Paul, being the most successful musician in the world, should be playing there."

Glazier was one of the 250,000 fans who enjoyed McCartney's performance in July for Quebec's 400th anniversary and he said the Tel Aviv crowd would not be disappointed.

"It was an absolutely dynamic concert. I couldn't believe that somebody who's supposed to be 66 has such energy. And I also couldn't believe the quality of the sound, no matter where you stood, and the crystal clear big screens. I never saw so much detail given to those elements," said Glazier.

However, he can't help concluding by introducing another shadow of a doubt.

"Whoever this person is, he can certainly play well. But I still think there's something missing. Is that voice singing 'Yesterday' the same voice that sang it in 1965? You decide."

Since then, Glazier has been a mainstay on the convention and college campus circuit, both in the US and Europe. But he's not just a conspiracy theorist - he's also a bona fide Beatles expert, and has been hired by the Delaware school system to present lectures to students on the importance of The Fab Four in popular culture.

For those too young - or too old - to remember the "Paul is dead" theory, it goes something like this: McCartney perished in a 1966 London car crash, but The Beatles, not wanting to make it public, used their clout to keep the tragedy secret. They hired the winner of a McCartney look-alike contest to take his place in the band, a lucky guy with the name of either William Shears Campbell, Billy Shears (the name of the fictitious leader of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) or William Sheppard.

What gave fuel to the fire were a slew of supposed hints to the switcheroo that fans gleaned from Beatles' lyrics, photos and album covers, first exposed in a college newspaper article and then picked up by a Detroit radio station, before breaking worldwide with extensive coverage on all major TV and print media.

"I think you have to pay tribute to the cover of Abbey Road for starting it all," said Glazier. "The four Beatles are walking across the street, in what looks like could be a funeral procession. John's in white, the religious leader, Ringo's in a tux - the funeral director, George is in work jeans, the grave digger. And Paul, he's barefoot and out of the step with the others. People interpreted that as alluding to the practice of burying people barefoot.

"In addition, he's holding a cigarette in his right hand, and he was famous for being a left-handed bass player, a sign that this Paul is an imposter. And finally, there's the license plate on the Volkswagen in the background - which reads LMW 28-IF, which was interpreted to mean 'Linda McCartney widow, and Paul would have been 28 'if' he hadn't died in 1966."

From there, fans went backwards to albums like 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which they claim houses a dozen more clues within the photo imagery on the front and back covers - including the back cover photo of the group with three of the Beatles facing forward and McCartney turned backward, with the words "Without you" printed next to his head from the song title "Within You Without You."

The cover of 1968's The Magical Tour shows three Beatles sporting red roses on their lapels, while McCartney's is black; and of course, Lennon supposedly sings "I buried Paul" at the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever."

And the list goes on - seemingly random details that, when combined together, might result in something more meaningful, according to Glazier.

"It certainly wasn't serendipity. Even if somebody could explain away one or two of the clues, how can you explain 70 of them? There were no coincidences when it came to The Beatles - everything was a precise, conscious decision, from the music to the album art," said Glazier, who discusses the phenomenon with a coyness of someone who loves keeping the legend alive.

He pointed to other chronological occurrences which he says provide additional ammunition of an upheaval in the Beatles world, as caused by McCartney's death.

"During 1967, when Sgt. Pepper's came out, The Beatles stopped performing live because the new Paul wasn't up to playing in public. And by 1970, the band had conveniently broken up and no longer had to deal with the questions. And some would say that since The Beatles years, the quality of Paul's songwriting is not what it once was. But that's a judgment call," said Glazier.

But according to Israeli Beatles historian Yarden Uriel, Hebrew author of two books on the group, the "Paul is dead" theorists are simply forgetting the main argument against acceptance of an imposter McCartney - human nature.

"Just because they were The Beatles, it doesn't mean that they don't behave in the same way that real people do, and that they interact with people in the same way as we do," said Uriel.

"Let's assume for a minute that Paul really did die and was replaced by a look-alike. The Beatles were very strong people individually - John, George and even Ringo.

"Do you think they would let this new guy come in and dominate the band, as Paul did on Sgt. Pepper's and all the way to Abbey Road and Let it Be? It's human nature that he would be relegated to the back and Lennon would take over the band. It's just not plausible. But people want to believe it because they like conspiracies. It's a great sociological study."------------------------

One thing that always gets me is the emphasis on all the "clues." All you have to do is look at pictures to see that Paul was replaced. I'm sure the "rumor" got started b/c someone noticed that the guy on the "Strawberry Fields"/"Penny Lane" videos wasn't Paul.

I first suggested that one of the Bob Dylan imposters may have been a woman, with voice overdubbed (in 1969, for example in the Johnny Cash-Fob Fylan TV show videos). Then a year later a movie come's out with Cate Blanchett playing one of the multiple "Bob Dylan" characters.

Dylan had an unusually small and thin physique; maybe easier to find a woman who could fill this requirement.

About Cate Blanchett, this interesting sync from wikipedia article about former SOE heroine Pearl Witherington (allegedly the McCartney imposter, I noticed that she also looks like ERIC IDLE!)---

Private lifeIn September 1944, Witherington returned to England where she married Henri Cornioley in Kensington Register Office on 26 October 1944; they had a daughter, Claire.

With the help of journalist Hervé Larroque, Witherington's autobiography, Pauline, was published in 1997 (ISBN 978-2-9513746-0-7). Much of her wartime service is also included in the book Behind Enemy Lines with the SAS (published in 2007 by Pen and Sword Publ., England).

Her story is said to have been the inspiration for the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray which was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett in 2001,[2] although Faulks denied this in an interview with The Guardian.[8]

...........

I guess "the musical Monty Python" Eric Idle (Rutle Paul character Dirk McQuickly (styled after Paul McCartney) -- played by Eric Idle) is Pearl Witherington's son, so he is the son of Beatle Faul, now isn't that funny ("I want to be called Loretta") ..........

Here come ole flattop

Also reminds me of Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, a film with many Crowley-Beatles-links.

MMT comics panel: "Thinks I AM the Driverr/ Thought I WAS the Courier"

From the "Spartacus School" web site on PEARL WITHERINGTON:

Her commander recalls: 'She used to say, "I don't think it's very nice to go into a restaurant on my own." She'd come into France on her own, but didn't think it was nice to go into a restaurant on her own!'

Pearl came from Hertfordshire but was working in Paris. She and her family escaped in 1941 with help from the resistance, and she started work as a secretary in the Air Ministry.

Bored with office work, she signed up as a FANY. After training she was sent to the southern Loire. When the organiser was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, Pearl took over the command of the Wrestler network and built it up to over 2,000 men who she trained and armed. Her group held off 2,500 German troops with 150 men. Pearl escaped through a cornfield.

In June 1944, her network cut the railway line to Paris 800 times. She became so important, the Germans put up posters offering 1 million francs for her capture.

'When we got back to London all the heads of circuits were there; they were all men, and I was the only woman. The head of it all said "Gentlemen!" And he turned to me and said: "That applies to you, because you've done a man's job!" I'm the only woman who's ever done such a thing: going from a courier to military commander!'

Others were not so keen to recognise her achievement. She was recommended for the Military Cross but, as a woman, was not allowed to receive it. She was awarded a civilian MBE that she returned because she had done nothing as a civilian. 'Why should secret agents who risked their lives be treated like someone who sat behind a desk during the war?'